Afterglow of Creation: Decoding the message from the beginning of time

It’s the oldest fossil in creation. It accounts for 99.9% of all the light in the Universe Its discoverers mistook it for the ‘glow’ of pigeon droppings (yet still carried off the Nobel prize) The discovery in 1992 of ‘cosmic ripples’ – slight variations in the temperature of radiation left over from the Big Bang – led to sensational headlines and a scramble among scientists to claim credit. ‘It’s like seeing the face of God’, declared one of the researchers. In this new and fully revised edition of Afterglow of Creation, Marcus Chown goes behind the hype and the hysteria to provide a clear and lively explanation of one of the biggest discoveries in modern science – and a brilliant picture of what happened next.